[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Re: may be a bug

Perry A. Stoll pas@lems.brown.edu
Mon, 24 Jun 1996 14:52:32 -0400 (EDT)


I know of one thing that can hold references. In the interpreter, you can
reference the last value returned by using an underscore.
 
For example:
 
>>> x = 1
>>> x
1
>>> z = _
>>> z
1
 
So that should account for the drop in refcount from 5 to 4 in your 
example and probably why you found the problem in ArrayPrinter.py. 

I haven't read the documentation too recently, but I don't recall seeing 
this - is this documented? How did I find it? just lucky.
 
-Perry
 <pas@lems.brown.edu>
 

On Fri, 21 Jun 1996, Tser-Yuan (Brian) Yang wrote:

> Brian Yang wrote:
> 
> > The following may have been posted or even corrected. If so, I apologize
> > for sending junk mail.
> 
> > >>> from Numeric import *
> > >>> a=array((1,2))
> > >>> import sys
> > >>> sys.getrefcount(a)
> > 2
> > >>> a
> > 1 2
> > >>> sys.getrefcount(a)
> > 5
> > >>> b=1
> > >>> sys.getrefcount(a)
> > 4
> 
> Some experiment showed that the extra reference counts are held by
> something in ArrayPrinter.py, because I commented out the following line
> in numeric.py:
> 


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